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This text was written as a replacement for a lecture I was scheduled to give, but was unable to because of other issues, on a module on The Psychology of War and Peace at Sheffield Hallam University. March 2020
One starting point in considering oppression and cruelty in many psychology courses is to look at studies which have constructed situations in which people end up behaving in cruel and oppressive ways, such as Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s study of obedience. There is a psychology of oppression & cruelty but there’s more to human behaviour in crisis than the cruel and neglectful, and it’s important to try to construct a psychology of resistance to oppression and cruelty. Both Milgram and Zimbardo were well aware of this, which is apparent if you read their own accounts of their research (Milgram 1974, Zimbardo 2007), rather than the condensed textbook versions.
This essay will describe a number of case studies of people who, in various ways, did the right thing in evil situations, and then try to disentangle aspects of motivation, situation or personality which might have been important in their resistance.
In fact, many of Milgram’s own respondents successfully resisted the pressures of the experiment. Milgram ran very many versions of the shock experiment, and in most of them people resisted at much higher levels than the 32% in the version usually cited. He was interested in what factors would allow people to resist the commands of the experiment, and he found many, so that there were many conditions (where the ‘experimenter’ isn’t physically present, where there is a ‘fellow teacher’ who resists the ‘experimenter’, where there are two ‘experimenters’ who quarrel, and so on) where obedience was very low. Even in the standard version, there were many who resisted. There is a video of such a person at 13:44–15:55 in this video https://vimeopro.com/celialowenstein/portraits/video/110417804
Milgram was rightly interested in these resisters, I’ll discuss his account of them later on.
Recently, Zimbardo has moved into explicitly dealing with ‘heroism’ (though he later questioned whether ‘hero’ was the best word) as in Franco, Blau & Zimbardo (2011).
Franco et al develop a typology of ‘heroes’, ranging from those who face physical peril, whether military or civilian, to those who show social sacrifice: good Samaritans, bureaucracy heroes, or whistleblowers (also religious and political figures, martyrs, political or military leaders, adventurers, scientific heroes, underdogs). They found that the public view favoured physical peril as being heroic, and compared with physical risk, “social courageousness items were marked as heroic less frequently, showed greater overlap with altruism and were frequently viewed as being motivated by neither heroic nor altruistic intentions” Franco, Blau & Zimbardo 2011, p8
You can see Zimbardo talking about this project and his ‘Hero Construction Company’ in a 2012 interview at http://vimeo.com/40425064. The section I use in the lecture runs from 6:44 to 9:02. Another part of the interview will be referenced later.
Some examples
It’s important to remember that at all times, in all places, there are people who stand up for doing the right thing. Historically, many of them end up being recorded as martyrs, unfortunately, but that can be the way heroism goes. Here is a quick run-through of some examples, arranged chronologically. I will come back to some of them in more detail in trying to give a psychological account.
Slavery-era USA: I came across a nice example in a reprinted collection of papers from the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, published in The Underground Railroad (Still, 2017). The Committee was part of the ‘Underground Railroad’, which was a network in the early and mid-19th century which helped to organise the escape of slaves from the southern states of the U.S.A. to the free states in the North. This was a serious crime in the southern states, and even if they reached the North, slaves were vulnerable to being kidnapped, legally or otherwise, back into slavery. Still records that in 1856 a police officer from the Mayor’s Force turned up at their office at a time when they were expecting a party of escapers to arrive, which caused them great alarm, but he told them:
“I have just received a telegraphic despatch from a slaveholder living in Maryland, informing me that six slaves had escaped from him, and that he had reason to believe that they were on their way to Philadelphia, and would come in the regular train direct from Harrisburg; furthermore I am requested to be at the depot on the arrival of the train to arrest the whole party, for whom a reward of $1,300 [a very large amount of money in 1856: slaves were valuable possessions] is offered.
Now I am not the man for this business. I would have nothing to do with the contemptible work of arresting fugitives. I’d rather help them off. What I am telling you is confidential. My object in coming to the office is simply to notify the Vigilance Committee so that they may be on the look-out for them at the depot this evening and get them out of danger as soon as possible. This is the way I feel about them; but I shall telegraph back that I will be on the look-out.” Still 2017, p246
This probably risked his job, and maybe prosecution. Good work, un-named police officer.
World War One: Not all soldiers are prepared to follow orders to kill. Harry Patch was one of the longest-surviving soldiers from World War One. He was a member of a machine-gun team, a main mechanism for delivering death, but he wrote in his memoir:
“The team was very close-knit and it had a pact. It was this: Bob said we wouldn’t kill, not if we could help it. He said ‘we fire short, have them in the legs, or fire over their heads, but not to kill, unless it’s them or us.’” Patch, 2007, p71
Early stages of the Holocaust: Paul Grüninger (Paul Groeninger in some English-language versions), was a Chief of Police on part of the Swiss border with Austria in 1938-39. After the Nazi occupation of Austria in March, 1938, the Swiss government decided to prevent the movement into Switzerland of Jewish refugees. They cited concerns about the risks of ‘overload’ of refugees/asylum seekers, foreigners who would have difficulty integrating. There was fear of foreign ‘overpopulation’ in a small country. Refugees were depicted as ‘rejects, the dregs of society’.
This reasoning might sound familiar to you.
In April, 1938 border guards were ordered to refuse entry to those crossing from Austria without an entry visa. Grüninger and his staff ignored these commands, and used several strategies to admit Jews ‘legally’, as well as illegally. They allowed 2-3,000 refugees into Switzerland. In April, 1939, he was suspended from duty. In 1940 he was convicted of allowing refugees to enter Switzerland illegally. He was dismissed and lost his pension and all other public employee privileges. He died in poverty in 1972. He was pardoned posthumously in 1995 (Rochat & Modigliani, 2000)
He later said of his motivation
“…we did not have the heart simply to send the refugees back and, who knows, perhaps even to condemn to death people who had been mistreated in the most shameful way in Germany […] we were guided also by the opinion of a large portion of the Swiss people, of the press, and of the political parties.” Rochat & Modigliani, 2000, p99
Later: From 1935 to 1943 Irena Sendler or Irena Sendlerowa worked for the Department of Social Welfare and Public Health of the City of Warsaw.
She also pursued informal, and during the war conspiratorial, activities, such as rescuing Jews, primarily as part of the network of workers and volunteers from that department, mostly women. Sendler participated, with dozens of others, in smuggling Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and then provided them with false identity documents and shelter with willing Polish families or in orphanages and other care facilities, including Catholic run convents, saving those children from the Holocaust. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
There were a few options available. The first route led through the underground corridors of the courts in Leszno. Anonymous janitors were bribed. But what if the exit on the Aryan side was closed off?
The trolley tracks were the second route – Irena could count on the help of a tram driver she’d befriended, Leon Szeszko. The third option was to walk out together with the worker brigades. […] Route number four was the ambulance leaving the ghetto. Infants were carried across in crates and sacks. […] A loudly barking dog was bought so as to obscure the crying of babies. Irena Sendlerowa would bridle at being called a heroine, so let us call her a social activist. She saved 2,500 Jewish children. Not by herself, as she always emphasised. During the war and the time of the occupation, she dreamt of having dry shoes. Her interests were politics, history, and people. Culture.pl https://culture.pl/en/artist/irena-sendlerowa
The citizens of Le Chambon and André and Magda Trocmé: Le Chambon is a remote mountain plateau in south-eastern France, where people in many villages sheltered Jews from deportation and en route to escape to Switzerland.
When the deportations began in France in 1942, Trocmé
, the local pastor, urged his congregation in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (S.E.France) to give shelter to any Jew who should ask for it. The village and its outlying areas were quickly filled with hundreds of Jews. Some of them found permanent shelter in the hilly region of Le Chambon, and others were given temporary asylum until they were able to escape across the border, mostly to Switzerland. Jews were housed with local townspeople and farmers, in public institutions and children’s homes. With the help of the inhabitants some Jews were then taken on dangerous treks to the Swiss border. The entire community banded together to rescue Jews, viewing it as their Christian obligation. Yad Vashem https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/trocme.html
“We do not know what a Jew is. We only know men”, he said when asked by the Vichy authorities to produce a list of the Jews in the town. Hallie, 1979, p103
Trocmé urged his congregants to “do the will of God, not of men,” and stressed the importance of fulfilling the commandment in Deuteronomy 19:2-10 concerning the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter. Yad Vashem
I won’t go into the story of Oskar Schindler right here. The story is well-known and the book Schindler’s Ark, and the film Schindler’s List give lots of detail. I’ll discuss him later.
There are many more stories. The Yad Vashem Foundation instituted an award Righteous Among the Nations, for non-Jews who had rescued Jews during the Holocaust.
“In a world of total moral collapse there was a small minority who mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values. These were the Righteous Among the Nations […] Contrary to the general trend, these rescuers regarded the Jews as fellow human beings who came within the bounds of their universe of obligation.” Yad Vashem Foundation
You can probably think of many well-known cases that might qualify: Paul Grüninger, Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, Raoul Wallenberg – but how many were there in total?
What would you think, given that in most of those times, in many of those places, helping Jews in any way was at least illegal, and in many cases could lead to being immediately killed or tortured. A dozen, a hundred, a few hundred, a few thousand?
My initial guess was several hundred or a few thousand. When I checked I found that by 1 January 2019, Yad Vashem had recognized over 27,000 Righteous Among the Nations from 51 countries.
So many. Not enough, obviously, but this kind of resistance is something that many people will rise to, if necessary.
Vietnam War: In the midst of the atrocities of war, there are always those who resist. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, there was a massacre in the village of My Lai, during which American soldiers spent hours killing, raping and mutilating between 300 and 500 defenceless civilians of all ages. You can easily find horrible details of this, so I won’t spell them out here. Amongst the soldiers on the ground, there were those who refused orders to shoot people. Here is an account from Harry Stanley:
Lt Calley ordered [me] to shoot these people and I refused, and he told me he was going to court-martial me when we got back to base camp, and I told him what was on my mind at the time. Ordering me to shoot down innocent people: that’s not an order, that’s craziness to me. I don’t feel I have to obey that. If you want to court-martial me you do that if you think you can get away with it. […] It was immoral to me.
You can see this brief interview Harry Stanley at 6:07 onwards at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ap96BUJgz4 This, and the clip with Hugh Thompson (below), are from the Yorkshire Television documentary Four Hours at My Lai. There are many horrible things in this programme, but the interviews with Stanley and Thompson are not horrible.
Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who was flying cover for the troops on the ground, started to realise that something had gone wrong.
During the mission as it was going on, we kept just reconning around: started seeing a lot of bodies. It didn’t add up, you know, how people were getting killed and wounded, and we weren’t receiving any fire – just didn’t make sense: there was too many casualties and how they were – the locations they were in – y’know, figured our artillery couldn’t do this – bodies in places the artillery didn’t hit – trying to get out of the village.
He landed his helicopter, and found a group of soldiers advancing on a group of women and children. Larry Coburn, Thompson’s door gunner:
“Warrant Officer Thompson was desperate to get these civilians – what he believed to be civilians – out of this bunker and into a safe area. He’s seen beforehand that what he was trying to do to help the people on the ground wasn’t getting done. He was convinced that the ground forces would kill these people if he couldn’t get to them first. He landed the aircraft between the American forces and the Vietnamese people in the bunker, got out of the aircraft, had us get out of the aircraft with our weapons to cover him, and he went and had words with the Lieutenant on the ground. He asked the Lieutenant how he could get these people out of the bunker. The Lieutenant said the only way he knew was with hand grenades, so when Warrant Officer Thompson came back to the aircraft he was furious, and he was desperate to get these people out of the bunker himself. […] He told us if the Americans were to open fire on these Vietnamese as he was getting them out of the bunker that we should return fire – on the Americans”.
Hugh Thompson: “When I did instruct my crew – my crew chief and gunner – y’know, to open up on them if they opened up on any more civilians, I don’t know how I would have felt if they had opened up on them, but that particular day I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. They were the enemy at that time, I guess”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4MFdDqpr4 1:34 to 4:50
Thompson and his crew recruited help from other helicopters, and airlifted over a dozen civilians to safety. Thompson was unpopular as a result of his actions. On later missions, his crew member Glenn Andreotta was killed, and Thompson broke his back in a crash. His actions were sharply criticised by some back in the States. Democrat Congressman Mendel Rivers publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at My Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialled.
Eventually, Hugh Thompson was awarded the Soldier’s Medal in 1998, thirty years after his actions.
“The Soldier’s Medal is awarded to any person of the Armed Forces of the United States or of a friendly foreign nation who, while serving in any capacity with the Army of the United States, distinguished himself or herself by heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.”
Characteristically, he initially refused to accept the medal, unless Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, his crew members, both received the same honour.
If you want to follow up more on My Lai, it’s worth finding out about those who played a heroic role in uncovering the massacre, such as Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haeberle.
Palo Alto, California 1971: The Stanford Prison Experiment
This was Philip Zimbardo’s ‘fake prison’ study, in which randomly assigned student ‘guards’ bullied and abused other students who were acting as ‘prisoners’. The accounts of the experiment usually say something like ‘after six days, because of the escalating abuse by the guards ,the experiment was terminated’, which gives the impression that Zimbardo made the decision. However, Zimbardo makes it clear in his book (Zimbardo, 2007) that the initiative came from Christina Maslach, and that he initially opposed her. Maslach was going out with Zimbardo at the time, and he had invited her down to the study site to see all the fascinating stuff that was going on. She was appalled, and directed him to stop the study straight away.
“…I challenged whether she could ever be a good researcher if she was going to get so emotional from a research procedure. I told her that dozens of people had come down to this prison and no one had reacted as she had. She was furious. She didn’t care if everyone in the world thought what I was doing was OK. It was simply wrong. Boys were suffering. As principal investigator, I was personally responsible for their suffering. They were not prisoners, not experimental subjects, but boys, young men, who were being dehumanised and humiliated by other boys who had lost their moral compass in this situation.” Zimbardo, 2007, p170
Maslach was a research student at the time, and Zimbardo was a faculty member, so her opposition was risky to her in a number of ways.
Maslach recalls: “…a bit of a tirade by Phil (and other staff there) about what was the matter with me. Here was fascinating human behaviour unfolding, and I, as a psychologist, couldn’t even look at it? They couldn’t believe my reaction, which they may have taken to be a lack of interest. Their comments and teasing made me feel sick and stupid – the out-of-place woman in this male world – in addition to already feeling sick to my stomach by the sight of these sad boys so totally dehumanised.” Zimbardo, 2007, pp170-171
In fact Zimbardo reluctantly accepted her judgement and stopped the experiment. “At the time it was a slap in my face, the wake-up call from the nightmare that I had been living” p170. (They later married, and are still married, almost 50 years later, happily as far as I know. This is pretty good going for academics.)
Iraq: Abu Ghraib Prison 2004: There was systematic mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by a small group of American Army prison guards. You have probably seen the photographs. This is often portrayed as being just like the Stanford Prison Experiment. (My interpretation of the SPE is very different from the standard textbook one, and it’s clear from Zimbardo’s (2007) detailed account that the standard version of what happened, let alone the psychological interpretation, is inaccurate. I think that both Stanford and Abu Ghraib show how lax management and a generally malign environment allow dominant individuals with bullying tendencies to emerge and control the abuse. But that’s for another lecture.)
Sergeant Joe Darby, a military policeman at the prison, was given a CD with lots of photos of Iraq by Chuck Graner, one of the abusers, so he could pick some to send home to his family. Amongst the city scenes and sunsets, he discovered the now well-known photos of the physical and sexual abuse of the prisoners by Graner and other members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Darby sat on the photos for several weeks, and initially tried to expose this abuse anonymously, because he knew it would be dangerous for him to blow the whistle on it.
Darby didn’t do anything in a hurry. ‘I’d been in the military and around a lot of these guys long enough to know we take care of our own,’ he said. He anticipated what would be said if he reported the pictures: ‘That I was turning in my friends, that I was a traitor, that I was a stool pigeon.’ […] ‘Is it going to be worth the possible retaliation?’ Gourevich & Morris 2008, pp235-236
In the end, he handed the pictures to the army CID. He was right about possible consequences. The identity of the whistle-blower was kept secret in Iraq, but Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, named him in a congress committee. Darby was immediately smuggled back to the states for his own safety. There were repercussions for his family, too:
His wife had no idea that Mr Darby had handed in those photos, but when he was named, she had to flee to her sister’s house which was then vandalised with graffiti. Many in his home town called him a traitor. That animosity in his home town has meant that he still cannot return there…… …After Donald Rumsfeld blew his cover, he was bundled out of Iraq very quickly and lived under armed protection for the first six months…… …Mr Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. They have done everything but change their identities.
Bryan (BBC News August 2007)
Rwanda 1994: During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Paul Rusesabagina used his influence and connections as temporary manager of the Mille Collines hotel to shelter 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus for several months from being slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia.
Rusesabagina’s story is well-known and well-documented, including in his own book An Ordinary Man (2007), and in the film Hotel Rwanda (2004).
I’ll discuss him in more detail later.
A psychology of Doing the Right Thing
So, lots of cases. What is the psychology of all this? There isn’t a simple answer, and there’s not very much research. I’ll discuss that, and then make some suggestions based on the examples I’ve described so far.
Milgram has an appendix on ‘patterns among individuals’ in his book, which discusses the characteristics of those who resisted, but found but found few consistent similarities in them.
In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience or to make the simple-minded statement that kindly and good persons disobey, while those who are cruel do not. There are simply too many points in the processes at hand at which various components of the personality can play complicated roles to allow any oversimplified generalisations Milgram, 1974, p226
Milgram’s study is difficult to replicate, for ethical reasons, but there have been further analyses of his archives, and versions with less damaging ‘punishments’ which have been run, which suggest some consistencies. Stephen Gibson did a rhetorical analysis of transcripts from Milgram’s studies.
“Analysis draws attention to the way in which participants could draw the experimenter into a process of negotiation over the continuation of the experimental session, something which could lead to quite radical departures from the standardized experimental procedure.” Gibson, 2013, p290
Modigliani & Rochat (1995) analysed film and audio recordings of 36 respondents in the version of the Milgram study which was conducted in an office building in Bridgeport, rather than at Yale, where the obedience rate was 47%. They hypothesized that “The sooner in the course of the experiment a subject begins to show notable resistance, the more likely he will be to end up defiant.” p107. After analysis they concluded “the lower the voltage at which subjects first question, object, or refuse, the lower will be the final voltage they will deliver.” p117, original emphasis.
Both of these factors show the dynamic nature of agreeing to cooperate with evil, as Milgram did in stressing the importance of the gradual escalation of the level of shock in his original design. They point out the importance of quickly grasping what is going on, and of having the verbal and social skills to negotiate with the malign authority, both of which will crop up in later discussion.
Morselli and Passini (2010) analysed autobiographies by Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King. They found that all three report the influence of parents: ‘a very strong and self-confident person’ (King); ‘incorruptible and had earned a name for strict impartiality’ (Ghandi); ‘My father possessed a proud rebelliousness,, a stubborn sense of fairness that I recognise in myself (Mandela). All three recalled how encounters with new social contexts, peoples and ideas in adolescence affected their relationship with authority, and all three stressed the importance of social relationships and a supportive social context in dealing with the hardship and persecution that resulted from resisting authority.
Philip Zimbardo recorded a long interview about his Hero Construction Company project in 2012, already referred to. It is available at http://vimeo.com/40425064. In this part of my lecture I used the section from 10:40 to 14:35. It’s actually an hour-ling interview and discussion. This is the summary of the points he makes there.
He differentiates heroism from altruism because those who do it are aware of the personal cost and risk. There are three kinds of heroes
These categories don’t fit clearly with the examples I’ve given above. Perhaps Hugh Thompson and Christina Maslach as impulsive and reactive, but the other examples seem to have elements beyond the categories above.
What’s the difference between them in terms of psychology? Zimbardo’s conclusion in the interview is that “we don’t have a clue.” Milgram reached a similar conclusion about disobedience:
My overall reaction was to wonder at how few correlates there were of obedience and disobedience and how weakly they are related to observed behaviour. I am certain that there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it. In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience, or to make the simple-minded statement that kindly and good persons disobey while those who are cruel do not. Milgram 1974 p226
However, in the last chapter of The Lucifer Effect (Zimbardo, 2007), and on his website, Zimbardo does suggest some characteristics of those who are successful in resisting evil:
Those are rather dense terms, and it’s worth simplifying them a bit.
Mindfulness: this isn’t the meditation stuff. It’s to do with clearly realising what’s going on, what the implications and consequences might be – and not being sucked into doing something inhumane without paying attention to it. It also applies to not being the kind of person who ignores injustice if it doesn’t affect them.
Hardiness/accepting interpersonal conflict: being prepared to accept disagreement, being unpopular, not being accepted if you stand up for what you think is right. This is pretty obvious in those who refuse to go along with bullying peer groups.
Extended time-horizon: thinking about future consequences, both for possible victims, but also for yourself. ‘If I walk away now, it’ll be easier for me right now, but I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’
Resist rationalising inaction: don’t be led astray by thinking ‘there’s no point doing anything – it won’t make any difference’; ‘it’s not my responsibility’; ‘other people can intervene more effectively than me’. The traditional challenge: ‘if not you, who? If not now, when?’ is an encouragement to ‘resist rationalising inaction’.
Transcend anticipating negative consequences: Being prepared to accept that this might turn out badly for you – but being prepared to do it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. This is a tough thing to do.
Two of the people from my examples have recorded statements about their motivation. Read through these, and see if they fit with Zimbardo’s categories.
The first is from The Making of Hotel Rwanda (George 2004) in ‘additional material’ on the DVD of the film Hotel Rwanda, about Paul Rusesabagina.
Rusesabagina: I didn’t have any other motivation. I just took in people. I helped them. I was willing to do it, and I really didn’t have time to think about all that… Because it took every second, every minute, every day, seven days a week, and I had to work very hard, and very fast, always to avoid the disaster.
Of course, at a certain given time, I knew I was going to be killed. But I didn’t take it that way. I thought that – dying: one day, we’ll all die – but, at least, dying without doing anything, to me, was a failure. That was why I had to fight up to the end.
Don Cheadle, who played Rusesabagina in the film: It was as selfish an act to him as it was a selfless act, in that he could not have lived with himself, and he could not, you know, have looked in the mirror and gone on, knowing that he had left however many it was in his care at the hotel to perish, at a time when he felt that he could have done more.
Paul Rusesabagina: I took it as an obligation, to help my neighbour – whether I know him or not. Because, even if I do not know someone, why should he or she die? Why should she be killed? Is there any reason to take out somebody’s life?
Terry George, Director: When I listen to him talk and people ask him does he consider himself a hero, and he says “No, I’m an ordinary man: that was my job to do that. That’s what I had to do” and I think that’s the strength of Paul, the inner moral courage, the desire to help the ordinary man, is the strength of the character.
Then this is Joe Darby talking about why he revealed the Abu Ghraib photographs, from ‘additional scenes’ on the DVD of Standard Operating Procedure (Morris, 2008)
Joe Darby: I felt it was not only the right thing to do, but it was my job. I was my duty as an MP [Military Police] to do this, and I’ve never felt anything more than I was just an MP doing my job. My job in the army was to put people in prison for doing wrong, and that’s what I did. I would have been very, very happy if these people had been put in prison and it had ended there […]
I didn’t want it to become national news. I didn’t want to be labelled a hero or a traitor. I didn’t want people to know who I was. I just wanted people punished for the wrong they had done.
I don’t see myself as a hero or a traitor. I see myself as an MP who did his job and punished those who had broken the law. It was my burden to bear and, you know, I had to do it.
The resisters from My Lai show signs of ‘transcending anticipating negative consequences’. Harry Stanley: “If you want to court-martial me you do that, if you think you can get away with it.” Hugh Thompson: “I don’t know how I would have felt if they had opened up on them, but that particular day I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Bocchiaro & Zimbardo (2010) ran a variant of Milgram’s procedure (in which respondents were urged to give ‘learners’ insults instead of electric shocks). They found 60% refusers.
“To assess possible individual differences between disobedient and obedient participants, we compared the scores they obtained on BFQ [the Big Five Questionnaire]. No statistically significant differences were found on any of the five BFQ dimensions nor any of the 10 sub-dimensions.” p163 (added emphasis).
None of them thought that this behaviour was unusual or extraordinary. […] They believed they made a most obvious decision at that time in the experiment. Among the most common answers were “I think everyone would have done the same”. pp164-165
Another perspective
The examples I have given seem to show admirable characteristics like mindfulness, farsightedness, and courage, but there are also other factors which are not in themselves noble, or might not be seen as desirable in other circumstances. It’s possible that some of these admirable people would not be ones that you would choose as friends, or be comfortable working with. Some of them are people who chose to go against what was seen as right and reasonable in their society at that particular time, and they might not seem generally right-minded and reasonable people. Many of them broke the law in their actions, and those who are accustomed to breaking the law in other ways may find it easy to do, and be skilled at doing it, when the law turns out to be malign.
For instance, to maintain resistance in a hostile, dynamic environment, you need quick-wittedness, and social skill, to the extent of being the kind of person who can manipulate situations and persons to your own advantage. Schindler and Rusesabagina show this.
Oskar Schindler:
Because of his good business contacts, his conviviality, his gifts of salesmanship, his ability to hold drink, he had got a job even in the midst of the depression as sales manager of Moravian Electrotechnic. Keneally 1982 Schindler’s Ark p28
Johnathan Dresner: “He was an adventurer. He was like an actor who always wanted to be centre stage. He got into a play, and he couldn’t get out of it.”
Mosche Bejski: “Schindler was a drunkard. Schindler was a womanizer. His relations with his wife were bad. He often had not one but several girlfriends. After the war, he was quite unable to run a normal business. During the war, as long as he could produce kitchenware and sell it on the black market and make a lot of money, he could do it. But he was unable to work normally, to calculate normally, to hold down a normal job, even in Germany. […Everything he did put him in jeopardy. You had to take him as he was. Schindler was a very complex person. Schindler was a good human being. He was against evil. He acted spontaneously. He was adventurous, someone who took risks, but I’m not sure he enjoyed taking them … He was very, very sensitive. If Schindler had been a normal man, he would not have done what he did.” Silver, 1992, p147-148.
On the other hand, when
…two Gestapo men came to his office and demanded that he handed over a family of five who had bought forged Polish identity papers ‘Three hours after they waked in’ Schindler told the writer Kurt Grossman, ‘two drunken Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incrimination documents they had demanded.’. Silver, 1992, p149
‘I don’t know why he did it,’ they say. ‘Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oscar was an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system, and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it, and not to be overwhelmed.'” Keneally, 1982, p278
Paul Rusesabigina, an assistant manager of a luxury hotel in the capital city of a poor country, recounts that he was familiar with corruption and manipulation in better times
They gave me an office of my own, as well as the authority to dispense little perks here and there to favoured guests. An Army general who came infrequently would get a free cognac, or perhaps a lobster dinner. It made them feel appreciated, which is a universal hunger among all human beings. p58
I took my morning coffee at the bar, watched the comings and goings, made careful note of who the regulars were, followed the gossip about their careers, and saved up that knowledge for the frequent times when I would find myself clinking glasses of complimentary Merlot with a man whose friendship was another link to the power web of the capital and whose favour I could count on in the future. And the presence of beverages always kept the tone easy and social, even when the subtext of the discussion was quite serious. Rusesabagina, 2007, pp64-65
He used those skills to good effect later.
Today I am convinced that the only thing that saved those 1,268 people in my hotel was words. Not the liquor, not money, not the UN. Just ordinary words directed against the darkness, I used words in many ways during the genocide – to plead, intimidate, coax, cajole, and negotiate. I was slippery and evasive when I needed to be. I acted friendly towards despicable people. I put cartons of champagne in their car trunks. I flattered them shamelessly.
I said whatever I thought it would take to keep the people in my hotel from being killed. I had no cause to advance, no ideology to promote beyond that one simple goal. Rusesabagina, 2007, p xvii
So as well as mindfulness, farsightedness, courage, quick-wittedness and social skill, manipulativeness and readiness to break the rules may be important. Alternatively, however, an unusual determination to follow rules and principles, unreasonable insensitivity to social niceties, and overwhelming confidence in one’s own judgement might be helpful. After all, these people may be completely rejecting what is currently seen as sensible and right behaviour, and may be inconveniencing or endangering their friends and neighbours, as well as rejecting their neighbours’ views about the oppressed. These characteristics may be associated with some degree of autism. Attwood (2020) notes that those with autism are usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind, and being honest and determined and having a strong sense of social justice. They may show remarkable honesty, and delay in the development of the art of persuasion, compromise and conflict resolution.
Moorehead (2014) comments on André and Magda Trocmé, the church couple who were important in encouraging the villagers to shelter Jews in Le chambon. “…they were also complicated, overbearing and strong.” p112; “Somewhat similar in temperament, both impatient, short-tempered, outspoken, highly-educated and apparently sure of themselves…” p114; “A colleague observed that Trocmé possessed an openness and a courage ‘unusual, alas, in our churches’, and that he had rarely met a Christian ‘so little frightened of the consequences of clarity’.” p115
A New York Times account of Sherron Watkins, who was the whistleblower who exposed the massive frauds in the Enron Corporation, describes similar characteristics:
In the cutthroat business culture of the Enron Corporation, where toughness and a sharp tongue were often prerequisites for success, Sherron S. Watkins could be noticeably tough and sharp.
One former colleague described her as ”a bull in the china shop” at times. Others mistook the Texan Ms. Watkins for a brusque New Yorker. But several former colleagues agreed that her toughness was rooted in a strong sense of business ethics and that she was unafraid to deliver difficult news, even to her superiors.
”In my experience, she was not afraid to speak the truth, even when it was uncomfortable,” said Stephen Schwarz, a former Enron employee who worked with Ms. Watkins, Yardley, 2002
Watkins herself describes her dependence on her Christian faith, and the importance of taking guidance from the Scriptures literally:
It was an unsettling time, the morning after the disclosure, I woke to camera crews surrounding our house. My hands were shaking, I was so nervous about the situation. I picked up my Bible and opened by chance to Hebrews 12. The first 3 verses say,
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” http://www.sherronwatkins.com/sherronwatkins/My_Passion.html (no longer available)
Although her actions are different from those of the people described here, Greta Thunberg is also someone who is prepared to take a stand against general indifference to a major problem. She sees her autism as a help in her actions.
I just know what is right and I want to do what is right. I want to make sure that I do everything in my power to stop this crisis from happening. I have Asperger’s – I’m on the autism spectrum – so I don’t really care about social codes. [..] It makes you different, it makes you think differently, and especially in such a big crisis as this, when you need to think outside the box. Interview with CBS This Morning, 2019
Everyone else is “OK, it’s very important, but I am too busy with my life…”, and I just thought it was very strange that no-one else was behaving in a logical way. What would the logical way be? To do something; to step out of your comfort zone. Interview with Democracy Now! 2019
I have heard a quote from Thunberg in which she says explicitly that neurotypical people are able to think ‘something must be done’, and ‘things can carry on as normal’ at the same time, but her condition means that it is literally impossible for her to do that – and that’s why her condition has given her the power to do what she’s done – but I can’t find it to give you the precise source.
The banality of good action
On the other hand, it may be possible to establish an environment which promotes the banality of heroism. Rochat & Modigliani (1995) comment on the villagers of Le Chambon:
Almost all of those involved in the effort at Le Chambon had not plotted in advance to counter the Vichy Government. Only gradually did they arrive at a path that flatly opposed the government’s policies and actions regarding refugees and Jews.
[…] In effect, they established an orientation of civility and kindness toward persecuted people and they proceeded to maintain this stance after it was officially outlawed by the authorities.
[…] They did one thing at a time, and one thing after the other, each move bringing them closer to becoming the rescuers we admire today. pp201-205
This is a passing point in this essay, which is worth developing more, perhaps in the context of Zimbardo’s account of the situational factors which encourage evil behaviour, which I mention in the next section.
Heroes
All cultures know about heroes, and traditional/mythical tales of heroes often describe their motivations. Franco & Zimbardo (2006), describe this as:
“…a code of conduct served as the framework from which heroic action emerged. In this code, the hero follows a set of rules that serves as a reminder, sometimes even when he would prefer to forget, that something is wrong and that he must attempt to set it right.” p35
My examples sometimes echo that. Harry Stanley: “It was just immoral to me”; Joe Darby: “My job in the army was to put people in prison for doing wrong, and that’s what I did […] It was my burden to bear and, you know, I had to do it.”
But Zimbardo also points out that Great Heroes are not a very useful example for most people. Almost by definition, they do stuff we can’t or wouldn’t do. Everyday heroes are better examples – and maybe ‘heroes’ isn’t the right word: People who do the right thing. It’s possible that there are many of those around.
Zimbardo, Breckenridge & Moghaddam, (2013) asked a nationally representative sample of 4000 participants from the general public in the United States “Have you ever done something that other people – not necessarily you yourself – considered a heroic act or deed?” 20% said yes. Among those:
55% had helped someone during an emergency,
8% confronted an injustice,
14% had defied unjust authority, and
5% had sacrificed for a stranger (organ donation or similar).
In this study, both blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to have performed heroic deeds. Zimbardo & al suggest that in contrast to an “exclusive” vision of heroism, which presents heroic leadership by exceptional individuals, an “inclusive” vision depicts heroism as integral to everyday life for ordinary people, and widespread volunteer participation in social life as normative in all democracies. The occasions people recalled may have been trivial compared with the actions of the Righteous Among the Nations, but both examples are encouraging.
General social support for right actions, even if it isn’t very strident, may also help individuals in doing the right thing. Grüninger said about his law-breaking; “we were guided also by the opinion of a large portion of the Swiss people, of the press, and
of the political parties” (Rochat & Modigliani, 2000, p99), and Gandhi, M.L. King, and Mandela all stressed the importance of support from others in their autobiographies.
Zimbardo is still convinced of the importance of the social environment in promoting good or bad behaviour.
…there are no special attributes of either pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both conditions emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving particular individuals across a dividing line from inaction to action. There is a decisive decisional moment when a person is caught up in a vector of forces that emanate from a behavioural context. These forces combine to increase the probability of one’s acting to harm others or acting to help others.”
[…] Among the situational action vectors [for evil behaviour] are group pressures and group identity, the diffusion of responsibility for the action, a temporal focus on the immediate moment without concern for consequences stemming from the act in the future, presence of social models, and commitment to an ideology. Zimbardo (2007), pp485-486 (emphasis added)
These factors can act to promote evil behaviour, but there is always the possibility turning them round to promote good. It’s worth noting that Christina Maslach has pointed out that refusing to obey malign orders, or resisting oppression isn’t enough: people need to do something to stop it – as she did at Stanford.
What would I like to be the takeaway messages from this piece?
In response to the oversimplified accounts of the psychology of obedience and conformity, based on the work of people like Milgram and Zimbardo fifty years ago, we should remember:
Resistant participants in Milgram’s study: Paul Grüninger; Oskar Schindler; Irena Sendlerowa; Hugh Thompson; Harry Stanley; Chris Maslach; Joe Darby; Paul Rusesabagina – and countless others. These are people who deserve our respect, but they are also people who deserve further psychological study, to hep to develop a psychology of Doing The Right Thing.
References
Attwood, Tony (2020) What is Aspergers https://www.tonyattwood.com.au/about-aspergers/what-is-aspergers Accessed 13 March 2020
Bocchiaro, Piero, Zimbardo, Philip (2010) Defying Unjust Authority: An exploratory study Current Psychology 29, 155-170
Bryan, Dawn (BBC News August 2007) Abu Ghraib whistleblower’s ordeal Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6930197.stm Accessed 14 March 2020
Franco, Zeno & Zimbardo, Philip (2006) The Banality of Heroism Greater Good Fall/Winter 2006/7, 30-35 Available online at http://www.lucifereffect.com/articles/heroism.pdf
Gibson, Stephen (2013) Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Rhetorical Analysis British Journal of Social Psychology 52, 290-309
George, Terry (2004) Additional Material Hotel Rwanda DVD
Gourevitch, Philip and Errol Morris (2008) Standard Operating Procedure London: Picador
Hallie, Philip (1979), Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There New York: Harper & Row
Milgram, Stanley (1974) Obedience to Authority NY: HarperCollins
Modigliani, Andre & Rochat, François (1995) The Role of Interaction Sequences and the Timing of Resistance in Shaping Obedience and Defiance to Authority Journal of Social Issues 51(3), 107-123
Morehead, Caroline (2014) Village of Secrets: defying the Nazis in Vichy France London: Vintage
Morselli, Davide and Passini, Stefano (2010) Avoiding Crimes of Obedience: A Comparative Study of the Autobiographies of M.K. Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr Peace and Conflict; Journal of Peace Psychology, 16, 295-319
Rochat, François & Andre Modigliani (2000) Captain Paul Grueninger: The Chief of Police Who Saved Jewish Refugees by Refusing to Do His Duty in Thomas Blass Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Rusesabagina, Paul (2007) An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda London: Bloomsbury
Silver, Eric (1992) The Book of the Just New York; Grove Press
Still, William (2017) The Underground Railroad London: Arcturus Publishing (first published 1872)
Van Emden, Richard (2007). The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches. London: Bloomsbury
Yardley, Jim (2002) Enron’s Collapse: the Employee; Author of Letter To Enron Chief Is Called Tough New York Times, Jan 16, 2002 https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/16/us/enron-s-collapse-the-employee-author-of-letter-to-enron-chief-is-called-tough.html
Zimbardo, Philip (2007a) The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
Zimbardo, Philip (2007b) Resisting Social Influences and Celebrating Heroism (chapter 16) in The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
Zimbardo, Philip (2012) talking about his Heroic Imagination Project: http://vimeo.com/40425064
Zimbardo,P.G., Breckenridge,J.N. & Moghaddam,F.M. (2013) “Exclusive” and “Inclusive” Visions of Heroism and Democracy. Curr Psychol 32, 221–233
This is the second of three posts on the Stanford Prison Experiment: the myth of what happened (last post), an alternative explanation for what happened (this post), and how that relates to the abuses at Abu Ghraib (next post).
The oversimplified version of the SPE is that the guards all became abusive, irrespective of their values and personalities, because they fell into the role required of them in the prison situation. Zimbardo’s full account of the study in The Lucifer Effect (2007) shows it was much more complicated than that, and he discusses thoughtfully and at length the various processes involved. As usual, this shows the value of going back to original accounts or papers, rather than relying on the text-book versions. I’ve discussed in the previous post how Zimbardo’s account shows considerable ‘personality-related’ variation in behaviour amongst both prisoners and guards, and questioned the extent to which situation/role governed everyone’s behaviour (though Zimbardo points out quite convincingly how he himself was overcome by the expectations of the ‘prison governor’ role).
The kind of thing that happened in the SPE does happen in other total institutions* (schools, children’s homes, care homes: see examples in the previous post), so the ‘SPE effect’ is pretty robust – but not all these total institutions have potentially dangerous inmates and a punitive (or at least corrective) ethos like a prison, so it can’t be simply the ‘prison guard role’ which is causing the effect.
My explanation is rather simple: individuals with a propensity for bullying and the ‘rotten apple’ effect, coming together in a total institution environment with lax controls on worker behaviour.
Zimbardo’s account distinguishes clearly between the ‘tough guards’ and the ‘good guards’, and even discusses a power struggle between them, which the tough guards win. One individual stands out: a guard named by Zimbardo in the book as Hellman (not his real name), who the other guards nicknamed ‘John Wayne’. In the available videos of the SPE which you may have seen he is a tall guard with straight fair hair who usually appears as taking a lead role in taunting the prisoners, and The Lucifer Effect emphasises his dominance and enthusiasm for mistreating the prisoners (which Hellman presents as his own ‘experiment’ to see how far he could go before someone stopped him: Zimbardo, 2007, p194).
Zimbardo commented on him, years later: “He was creative in his evil. He would think up very ingenious ways to degrade, to demean the prisoners.” BBC2 (2002)
Just after the end of the experiment, one of the prisoners talking to Hellman about how he might have behaved himself as a guard says: “I don’t think, I don’t believe, I would have been as inventive as you. I don’t think l would have applied as much imagination to what I was doing. Do you understand? […] I think I would have been a guard, I don’t think it would have been such a masterpiece!.” Zimbardo 2007, p193
I also remember Zimbardo reporting a conversation between one of the other guards and Hellman: “I know we have to do this stuff, Dave, but you don’t have to be so damn good at it.” I’m ashamed to say I can’t find the source for this now: if you know it, please let me know.
So, a personality difference, with one person seemingly more inclined to be abusive than others. But several other guards followed his lead, and no other guard, even ones that both Zimbardo and the prisoners regarded as ‘good guys’, effectively stopped the abuse. This is where the rotten apple effect comes in.
Whenever some example of institutional abuse or corruption emerges, some senior spokesperson will blithely say ‘of course, there are always a few rotten apples, but….’ to reassure the public that there’s no fundamental problem. Such people are using a metaphor they don’t understand (don’t you hate people like that?), are actually confirming (if they understood what they were saying) that there is a real systemic problem, and worst of all DON’T KNOW ABOUT STORING FRUIT. The point about a rotten apple is that it quickly makes all the other apples in the barrel rotten. If it’s not removed at the first sign of decay, the whole lot can be lost. And that’s what rotten apples do: they’re not isolated instances – they’re centres of systemic corruption, once they’re allowed to get away with their rottenness. That seems to be what happened in the SPE: a ‘creatively evil’ person, running their own ‘experiments’, and lax management (Zimbardo), who allowed that kind of thing to take hold. Zimbardo is well aware of that in retrospect, and in The Lucifer Effect he staunchly owns up to his responsibility. Zimbardo does understand the metaphor, but he turns it around by suggesting that the situation was a ‘rotten barrel’ which infected the apples, not the other way around. There is some truth in that, and it may be a characteristic of total institutions (especially those with lax management) to provide ideal conditions for the infection to spread unopposed, but the influence of someone like guard Hellman is an important starting point. There seems to have been a similar influence at Abu Ghraib, which I’ll describe in the next post.
* The term ‘total institution’ comes from Erving Goffman’s 1961 book Asylums: well worth reading as background to all this stuff. (Everything Goffman wrote is well worth reading.)
A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together live an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Goffman, 1961, 1991: p11 in 1991 Penguin edition
An ‘appreciable period of time’ doesn’t have to be continuous, I think, so day schools can fit here, though boarding schools do fit better.
References
The standard ref for the Stanford Prison Experiment is:
C Haney, C Banks, P Zimbardo (1973) Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison – International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97 (note this isn’t a psychological journal), but you probably won’t be able to get hold of that.
BBC2 (2002) The Stanford Prison Experiment
Goffman, Erving (1991, 1961) Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates London: Penguin Books
Zimbardo, Philip (2007, 2009) The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
There are very extensive and informative websites about the SPE at http://www.prisonexp.org/ and The Lucifer Effect at http://www.lucifereffect.com/ (but that’s not a substitute for reading the book).
This is a critical discussion of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study reported by Haney, Banks and Zimbardo in 1973, which gets a write-up in most introductory psychology books, and the place it has come to occupy in the mythology of psychology. It isn’t a criticism of the study itself or Zimbardo’s work, though I have some criticisms of Zimbardo’s conclusions from the study, but of the simplistic ways it has been reported and interpreted and applied to account for events like the mistreatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003/4. Zimbardo has recently provided a detailed account of the study in The Lucifer Effect (2007) and in that book, and more recent lectures, he gives a more nuanced account of the psychology of bullying and oppression than the accounts I’m criticising here.
Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues set up a fake prison, put volunteers into it as randomly assigned ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, and the ‘guards’ abused and bullied the ‘prisoners’ to such an extent that the experiment was stopped after a few days. The myth of the study is that it showed that role and situation overcame individuality; both guards and prisoners fell into their roles, whatever their personal or social inclination may have been, and that the study gives a full explanation of prison abuse. There is a comforting follow-on from being told this myth: now we know how these things work, we can avoid the same kind of thing happening again. That comfortable belief was shaken by the revelation of the physical and sexual abuse suffered by prisoners in the military jail at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2003/4, which was taken by many as ‘the Stanford Prison Experiment in real life’.
A Critical Psychology approach suggests that things are more complicated than this standard version. In 2007, Zimbardo published a book which contained a detailed, almost hour-by-hour, account of the study, which helps in this analysis.
A useful critical psychology framework is to ask who? where? why? and when? about a piece of research.
Who and where? Zimbardo was a young academic with an imaginative approach, working at a prestigious university in the USA.
When? The research was undertaken while the USA was at war in Vietnam, and not long after the Korean war.
Why? In both of these conflicts, US soldiers became long-term prisoners of war, and there was concern about how resistant these soldiers might be to interrogation, indoctrination and ‘brainwashing’. This concern was the original point of the study. The research was funded by the US Navy, and the point was to study how prisoners might react to stressful conditions. The guards were not originally the focus of the research. They were just there as part of the machinery of making things difficult for the prisoners. In fact, to start with the researchers thought that the guards were treating the prisoners too well (see later).
The myth is that everyone fell into their roles, and played them altogether too well: the prisoners cowed and intimidated, the guards bullying and sadistic. However, it’s clear from the 2007 account that there were considerable individual differences between the guards and their inclination to abuse prisoners – and the prisoners themselves showed wide individual differences in their behaviour, as the following quotes show:
Arnett [a guard] doesn’t like the fact that Tom-2093 is ‘too good’ in his ‘rigid adherence to all orders and regulations’. (Indeed 2093 will later be disparagingly nicknamed ‘sarge’ by the other prisoners precisely because of his militaristic style of obediently following orders. He has brought some strong values into the situation that may come into conflict with those of the guards….) p47
Prisoner 8612 tries to talk the others into going on a sit-down strike to protest these ‘unacceptable’ prison conditions… p48
The ringleader of the revolt is Paul-5704, who got his buddies in Cell 1 […] to agree that it was time to react against the violation of the original contract they made with the authorities (me). They push their beds against the cell door, cover the door opening with blankets. pp60-61
One of those prisoners commented: ‘Although I am usually quiet, I don’t like to be pushed around like this. Having helped to organise and participate in our rebellion was important for me. I built my ego up from there. I felt it was the best thing in my entire experience. Sort of asserting myself after the barricade made me more known to myself.’ p63
Meanwhile, in cell 1, two prisoners are quietly executing the first stage of their new escape plan. Paul-5704 will use his long fingernails, strengthened from guitar-picking, to loosen the screws in the faceplate of the power outlet. Once that is accomplished, they plan to use the edge of the plate as a screwdriver to unscrew the cell door lock. One will pretend to be sick and, when the guard is taking him to the toilet, will open the main entrance door down the hall. Signalled by a whistle, the other cellmate will burst out. They will knock the guard down and run away to freedom![…] but as bad luck would have it, Guard John Landry, making routine routine rounds, turns the door handle on Cell 1, and it falls to the ground with a resounding thud. Panic ensues [and the escape attempt is foiled]. pp63-64
Not all the guards were keen to be oppressive, and some had to be nudged by the researchers into being tougher:
Guard John Marcus seems listless. He rarely gets involved in the main activities in the Yard. Instead, he volunteers to do off-site duties, like picking up food at the college cafeteria. His body posture gives the impression that he is not enacting the macho guard image: he slouches, shoulders down, head drooping. p65
He is later taken aside and urged to ‘play the role of the tough guard’.
The warden takes [guard Markus] out to the yard and chastises him…
“The guards have to know that every guard has to be what we call a ‘tough guard’…”
[Markus objects] “…we need you to act in a certain way. For the time being, we need you to play the role of a ‘tough guard’… your individual style has been a little too soft” Zimbardo 2007, p65
Certainly, an abusive situation did develop, but from the 2007 account, it seems to have been the product of one or two dominant, bullying individuals, rather than something that was ‘produced’ by the situation. The situation did allow this bullying, because of Zimbardo’s deliberately laissez-faire management, but perhaps didn’t require it. This conclusion is supported by the outcome of a ‘replication’ staged by Reicher and Haslam in 2006 (lots of details at http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/). Although this wasn’t a true replication – there were many detail differences, although the starting setup was similar to Zimbardo’s – the outcome was very different, with co-operation between prisoners and guards, and prisoners sure of their rights taking back some dominance from the guards . Reicher and Haslam (2006) discuss how a different social milieu thirty years later, and different emerging social processes within the ‘prison’, could change the outcome so markedly.
Although there clearly were lessons to be learned about prison management from the original study, and Zimbardo has been an active expert witness on prison reform over the years, the idea that this knowledge can straightforwardly change things hasn’t been borne out either. In a 1998 paper, Haney & Zimbardo conclude that US prison policy showed “a consistent disregard of context situation in the criminal justice practices of the past 25 years” (p714). They conclude that this was because of a politically-driven shift of prison ideology from rehabilitation to punishment, and the failure of the politically motivated ‘war on drugs’; the significance and effectiveness of psychological research depends crucially on the social and political conditions of the time.
However, the Stanford study did seem to come true all over again in Abu Ghraib – perhaps as a result of lax management, and a dominant, bullying personality (Charles Graner), just as in the original study – but I think it’s more complicated than that. As always, it’s necessary to consider the surrounding social and political conditions. I’ll talk about that in my next post.
Certainly, the kind of thing that happened in the SPE does happen, with depressing regularity, but the ‘people fall into their (oppressive) roles’ explanation doesn’t really work. I don’t think bullying is part of the job description of prison guards, and it certainly doesn’t apply in other cases. For instance: a reported case of 16-year-old being tied up by teachers in UK, 2007….
Two teachers have been suspended after mobile phone footage showed a 16-year-old pupil being tied up with electrical tape and taunted in front of his classmates at a new academy in Kent.
At one point in the five-minute clip a voice, believed to be a teacher’s, says: ‘Give us a shout when you are ready to start grovelling.’ It ends with the pupil being released by another teacher. The boy was reportedly distressed. Polly Curtis, The Guardian Thursday December 20, 2007 (http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/20/schools.newschools),
…and it’s not the case that teachers are supposed to be sadistic bullies – and the same goes for care workers:
Winterbourne View care home “BBC One’s Panorama showed patients at a residential care home near Bristol, being slapped and restrained under chairs, having their hair pulled and being held down as medication was forced into their mouths. The victims, who had severe learning disabilities, were visibly upset and were shown screaming and shaking. One victim was showered while fully clothed and had mouthwash poured into her eyes.
Undercover recordings showed one senior care worker at Winterbourne View asking a patient whether they wanted him to get a “cheese grater and grate your face off?”
The abuse was so bad that one patient, who had tried to jump out of a second floor window, was then mocked by staff members.”
BBC News 26 October 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-20084254
…and only a rabid anti-cleric would suggest that bullying and oppression was the ‘role’ of a nun:
Children were forced to eat their own vomit and bathe in disinfectant at residential care homes run by nuns, the UK’s largest public inquiry into institutional child abuse was told on Monday.
During evidence on the behaviour of nuns from the Sisters of Nazareth order at two Catholic church-run children’s homes in Derry, the inquiry heard that children were beaten for bedwetting and had soiled sheets placed on their heads to humiliate them.
Nazareth House children’s home and St Joseph’s Home, Termonbacca, were both run by the Sisters of Nazareth in Derry. Forty-nine ex-residents of the two homes gave evidence about their treatment in written and oral testimony to the historic institutional abuse inquiry sitting at Banbridge courthouse.
A total of 16 church- and state-run orphanages, care homes and other institutions in Northern Ireland are under scrutiny in a public inquiry expected to last until June 2015.
Young people at Sisters of Nazareth properties in Derry were known by numbers rather than their names, and many were allegedly subjected to humiliation, threats and physical abuse, said Christine Smith QC, senior counsel for the inquiry.
Henry McDonald, The Guardian Monday 27 January 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/27/children-derry-care-homes-inquiry
I think there’s a different explanation, consistent with the happenings in the SPE, but quite different from the standard text-book myth, and a bit different from Zimbardo’s version. It’s briefly sketched above, but I’ll elaborate it, and talk about the Abu Ghraib case, in my next post.
References
Haney, Banks & Zimbardo (1973) Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison – International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69-97 (note this isn’t a psychological journal), This is the standard ref for the Stanford Prison Experiment but you probably won’t be able to get hold of it.
Haney, Craig & Zimbardo, Philip (1998) The Past and Future of American Prison Policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment American Psychologist, 53(7), 709-727. This doesn’t tell you anything very new about the SPE, but suggests that it didn’t have much effect on government policy.
Reicher, Stephen & Haslam, Alexander (2006) Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study British Journal of Social Psychology 45, 1–40
Available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/msh/mh_teaching_site_files/teaching_pdfs/C82SAD_lecture8/The%20Experiment%2001%20-%20Reicher%20%26%20Haslam%20(2006).pdf
Also see http://wwww.bbcprisonstudy.org for the BBC Prison Study
Zimbardo, Philip (2007, 2009) The Lucifer Effect London: Rider
There are very extensive and informative websites about the SPE at http://www.prisonexp.org/ and The Lucifer Effect at http://www.lucifereffect.com/
This started out as an overlong comment on Facebook, in response to some posts by Andrew Dunn and Colin Johnson about the brain-mind problem. Thanks, as always, to Andrew and Colin for giving me interesting things to think about. The starting point for the discussion was a video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGm5MJH8Xc4&sns=fb) suggesting that we can see mind as an emergent feature of brain, and/or that we can think of mind as being like software and brain like hardware. Both of those are ideas worth considering, and I find the software/hardware analogy quite alluring, though it doesn’t quite hold up or explain anything if you look at it closely, but then I thought: is this my problem? As a psychologist (and as an everyday walking-around person), the issue is mind (conscious awareness) and only mind. Phenomenologically, the *only* thing that exists for me is my mind/consciousness/awareness/experience, so that is the core reality. OK, from some outside perspective mind might be an epiphenomenon of brain activity, but for me, the brain activity is more of an epiphenomenon of my existence. I know that changes in brain activity affect my experience (vascular dementia, alcohol, whatever it is that makes me left-handed, which does seem to be related to other characteristics), and I will sometimes deliberately mess with my brain to affect my experience (alcohol), and maybe some things about my brain make that more or less dangerous for me than for others (addiction-prone or -resistant brain structures?)– but the only thing that’s actually going on for me is my experience. It would be fascinating to know something about the machinery of that experience, and that knowledge could be used to change my experience – as we now know enough about exercise physiology to bio-engineer athletic performance – but the brain things I might do with that knowledge would be mind-driven and mind-purposed. In the original discussion, Colin pointed out that that the bit we’re aware of is only a tiny fraction of all the things the brain does (absolutely right), and said “..and we are then supposed to induce that that small channel of neural activity is what makes you ‘you’? – nonsense”, and that’s right at one level – but at the level of my lived experience, me being “me” is the only game in town. I have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, and once I’ve done that I can’t be brain activity: there has to be a mind. All I have is my experience, and all that that is built on is my experience, and where that experience might come from is interesting, entertaining, and possibly useful, but it doesn’t stop my experience being my experience. So, although it might be possible to solve the problem of mind “by the objective and experimental analysis of the brain proper” (quote from Colin again), the only point of doing that, as a human, would be to satisfy our curiosity about how we work, or to use the information to modify our experience – so it remains an experiential, mind-governed enterprise. Actually, there’s also the problem of the inbuilt indeterminacy of the systems involved, which might make the problem insoluble in engineering terms (see https://millerpsych.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/chaos-determinism-psychology/) but it’s still worth trying). As an ex-physiologist, I’m fascinated by this stuff, just as I remember being mightily impressed by cross-current filtration in the kidney, and how that’s paralleled by cross-current heat exchangers in birds’ legs, but my real involvement in kidney physiology is having to get up to go to the toilet, or discussions and feelings about my friend’s experience of kidney failure. So, this is a claim for psychologists to be interested in mind-type things, and only bother about the brain where it clearly does impose on conscious experience, just as we only bother about society when it impinges from the other direction. Physiology and sociology and politics are fine, but they’re not really the appropriate level of analysis for a lot of what goes on with people (they are the right level of analysis for some other things that go on). This argument seems to me to be very similar to the resolution of Descartian doubt – how can I be sure that what I think I’m experiencing is what’s really going on? Well, if what I’m experiencing is all I can experience, who cares? Unless I’m being offered a choice between blue and red pills, I might as well – actually, I need to – get on with living that (possibly illusory) experience – what else could I do? As with the ‘let psychology be psychology’ argument above, there is some leakage from other realities: study of optical illusions shows a fracture between two versions of available reality, and you could see irrational dissonance reduction or Freudian repression and defence mechanisms as evidence of other fractures – and useful in casting light on what the ‘sum’ of ‘cogito ergo sum’ is, but still, there’s enough existential doubt around, for goodness sake, without actually needing to doubt one’s existence.
As The Man (Lao-Tzu) said: Open yourself to the Tao, then trust your natural responses; and everything will fall into place (Tao Te Ching 23, translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1988)
This was written at the turn of 2013/14, and if you’ve persisted this far, I wish you all a very Happy New Year – but remember that while the occurrence of New Year’s Day is, of course, entirely objectively explainable in terms of the chronology of the Gregorian calendar and the cosmology of the solar system, the irresponsible saturnalia driven by existential despair which goes on on New Year’s Eve (I can hear it going on next door as I write) is entirely mind- and consciousness-driven.
I’ve been rereading James Gleick’s excellent book Chaos (1988), and it started me thinking about the practical usefulness of a deterministic psychology.
Determinism in psychology has always been a personal problem for me, because it’s difficult to reconcile the rigid determinism that the science of psychology must lead to: ‘varying factor X will result in effect Y’, with the feeling of free will and choice which is an everyday experience. As a scientist, I have to go with determinism; as an individual, I feel I have free will and I regret the bad choices I continually make. OK, that’s an existential problem, but what about the practical usefulness of a deterministic psychology?
I think understanding chaotic systems and how they work gives us some ideas about this.
Here’s the creation myth of chaos theory: a meteorologist called Lorenz constructed a simple mathematical weather model in 1961 consisting of a dozen non-linear equations. These describe things like the relationship between temperature and atmospheric pressure, and pressure and windspeed. He fed data on these variables into a computer model and let it run to see what weather it would predict. In those days, computers were slow and calculations took a long time to run. On one occasion, he restarted the calculation that he had had to stop partway through by retyping in the figures that the incomplete run had produced.
To give the machine its initial conditions, he typed the numbers straight from the earlier printout. Then he walked down the hall to get away from the noise and drink coffee. When he returned an hour later, he saw something unexpected, something that planted the seed for a new science.
The new run should have exactly duplicated the old. Lorenz had copied the numbers into the machine himself. The program had not changed. Yet as he stared at the new printout, Lorenz saw his weather diverging so rapidly from the pattern of the last run that, within just a few months, all resemblance had disappeared. He looked at one set of numbers, then back at the other, he might as well have chosen to random numbers out of a hat. His first thought was that another vacuum tube had gone bad.
Suddenly he realised the truth. They have been no malfunction. The problem lay in the numbers he had typed. In the computer’s memory, six decimal places were stored: .506127. On the printout, to save space, just three appeared: .506. Lorentz had entered the shorter, rounded off numbers, assuming that the difference – one part in thousand – was inconsequential.
Gleick (1988), p16
But it wasn’t inconsequential. What Lorenz had discovered was that even a tiny change in the starting conditions of a process which depends on several non-linear functions can lead to unpredictable and far-reaching changes in final outcomes. This is what we now call the ‘Butterfly Effect ‘: a tiny change in weather conditions in one part of the world may lead to large unpredictable changes elsewhere. Because of this, it is now generally recognised that long-term weather prediction is practically impossible, no matter how sophisticated our computer models or how extensive and precise measurements of the conditions are.
I think the same applies in psychology. Although we can describe some psychological functions in terms of how factor X leads to effect Y, those functions are generally non-linear. A trivial but obvious example is the effect of amount of alcohol consumed on how good you feel. At low levels, increasing the amount consumed increases the sense of well-being in many people; a higher levels, increasing the amount consumed just leads to the resolution to never, ever, do this again.
Now, if the deterministic relationships which control our behaviour are non-linear, and we are complex systems in which many of these non-linear relationships interact, we are perfect examples of a chaotic system. As such, no matter how well we understand the relationships, nor how precisely we can measure (or control) the starting conditions, we cannot make long-term predictions of the outcomes.
Gleick sums this up later in the book in describing the views of psychiatrist Arnold Mandell:
To Mandell, the discoveries of chaos dictate a shift in clinical approaches to treating psychiatric disorders. By any objective measure, the modern business of ‘psychopharmacology” – the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself – has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows. Mandell offered his colleagues a chilling assessment of the most commonly used drugs. Phenothiazines, prescribed for schizophrenia, make the fundamental disorder worse. Tricyclic antidepressants “increase the rate of mood cycling, leading to long-term increases in numbers of relapsing psychopathological episodes.” And so on. Only lithium has any real medical success, Mandell said, and only for some disorders.
As he saw it, the problem was conceptual. Traditional methods of treating this “most unstable, dynamic, infinite-dimensional machine” were non-linear and reductionist. “The underlying paradigm remains: one gene – one peptide – one enzyme – one neurotransmitter – one receptor – one animal behaviour – one clinical syndrome – one drug – one clinical rating scale. It dominates almost all research and treatment in psychopharmacology. More than 50 transmitters, thousands of cell types, complex electromagnetic phenomenology, and continuous instability-based autonomous activity at all levels, from proteins to the electroencephalogram – and still the brain is thought of as a chemical point-to-point switchboard.” To someone exposed to the world of non-linear dynamics the response could only be: how naïve. Mandell urged his colleagues to understand the flowing geometries that sustain complex systems like the mind.
Gleick (1998), pp 298-299 (Gleick gives a reference to Mandell’s original writing: I’ve put that at the end).
We might not be quite so pessimistic as Mandell about the effectiveness of psychopharmacology, though even 25 years later I’m not sure that much has changed, and his description of the models used is a bit of a caricature, but the basic point of the unpredictable chaotic nature of the human system is surely valid.
So, even if it were the case that we were completely deterministic systems (like the meteorological systems of weather), and we could determine the relationships within those systems (which we are clearly a very long way away from being able to do at the moment), would that be useless in producing a fully descriptive, fully predictive psychology?
Well, yes and no. We now know that long-term fine-grained meteorological prediction is impossible, but short-term local weather forecasts can still be very useful, even though we don’t expect them to be completely accurate. Similarly (until we started messing around with things with ever-rising CO2 levels, at least) we can make reasonably reliable long-term general predictions. We know how April in Spain will generally differ from August in Spain, and how the weather there will generally differ from the weather in Finland at the same times of year. In many cases, that’s good enough to be going on with, but we are always aware of the possibility of ‘freak’, ‘unpredictable’ weather events.
Similarly, we can make pretty good short-term psychological predictions, certainly in terms of predicting the general outcome of experimental manipulations, and generally useful long-term predictions, based on the climatic differences between ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’, or convergent and divergent thinkers.
In fact, in a chaotic deterministic model, failures of prediction, such as the unpredictable extroverted behaviour of some introverts, and people’s ability to switch from convergent to divergent in certain circumstances, might not be disconfirming evidence for our models. Some unpredictability is to be expected. As long as we limit predictions to the very short term or to generalisms, and have some idea of the unpredictability to be expected (which chaos theory can give us), our models may serve pretty well. That is, they can serve understanding of the processes involved, but may be much less useful for control or categorisation. Even in a fully deterministic world, the ‘gene for believing in flying saucers’ is not going to be simplistically effective, and the test for leadership potential is not going to unerringly detect potential leaders.
So where does this leave the effective usefulness of a completely deterministic psychology, and what does it mean for the existential problem of the possible illusion of free will? I think it shows that the aim of describing, understanding and controlling human behaviour through deterministic (and reductionist) models is over-optimistic. We can make some weather-forecaster-like predictions, but more holistic and phenomenological ways of understanding are going to be equally useful. I think the same applies to determinism and free will. It may be that all my thoughts, reactions, and behaviours are determined, but if so, since they are determined in a way which is unpredictable (and may be unfathomable) carrying on behaving as though I have free will and I’m responsible for the choices I make not only seems to work, but might be the most practical alternative. We are aware that we are to some extent determined; we have ideas of internal and external compulsion, but we also have ideas about ways of working with that, and to the extent that these ideas work, they are practically, humanly, useful – even if fundamentally illusory. This is the solution that that old determinist Skinner came to in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Although he felt that behaviour was determined by reinforcement contingencies, somehow, if we have the ability to understand and manipulate those contingencies, we can choose to create better or worse worlds.
In some ways this is similar to the practical solution of the Cartesian problem, that we can never be sure that the world we experience is as it seems to be – that it is not an illusion produced by our senses. It could well be an illusion, but unless someone is offering us the red pill or the blue pill, there is no way of establishing that, and the only sensible thing we can do is to operate in the world as we experience it. What other world could we operate in? Also, we know that some parts of our world experience are illusory, and the understanding of that gives us a more secure basis for operating in good faith in other parts of the world.
Yes I know that’s simplistic, and ignores problems like the false consciousness associated with late-phase capitalism, but it works for me. Just as Samuel Johnson established the existence of the stone by kicking it*, my world of free will is established by the consequences of the good and bad choices I seem to be making, and the pleasure I experience in looking at the trees and birds which seem to be in front of me.
References
Gleick, James (1988) Chaos: Making a new science London: Cardina
Mandell, Arnold J. (1985) From Molecular Biological Biological Simplifiaction to more Realistic Central Nervous System Dynamics: an Opinion in Cavenar & al (eds) Psychiatry: Psychobiological Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry New York: Lippincott (cited in Gleick, 1988)
Skinner, B.F. (1971) Beyond Freedom and Dignity NewYork: Knopf
*After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”
— James Boswell In Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1820), Vol. 1, 218.
I’ve written about this before (https://millerpsych.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/was-more-psychology-disguised-as-physiology-now-psychology-the-secret-of-life/ and https://millerpsych.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/just-what-are-fmri-scans-supposed-to-be-proving/), but reading through Dorothy Bishop’s excellent BishopBlog (http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/), I came across a post of hers which made the points more clearly than I can:
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/brain-scans-show-that.html
Bishop also links to http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/brain-scans-prove-that-brain-does-stuff.html from Neuroskeptic, who makes similar points. Neuroskeptic’s argument is not as carefully organised as Bishop’s (and ends up by dismissing the James-Lange theory of emotions as obviously rubbish, which isn’t really justified), but is pleasantly forceful.
Neuroskeptic also discusses the Bennet & al (2009) ‘brain scan of emotion-judging activity in a dead fish’ study (http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/fmri-gets-slap-in-face-with-dead-fish.html) which Christina mentioned in her lecture. The original poster by Bennet & al (it didn’t make it into a peer-reviewed journal, as far as I know) is at http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.jpg – .
Why do we believe these stories, and believe that brain scans are the royal road to an understanding of the unconscious (or at least a way of answering psychological questions)? I’ll try to explain in my next lecture.
A piece in Psychology Today (July 29, 2012) by Neel Burton in their ‘hide & Seek’ column: The Creation of God: Michelangelo’s awesome hidden message. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201207/the-creation-god
It’s an analysis of Michaelangelo’s famous picture from the Sistine chapel ‘The Creation of Adam’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Creaci%C3%B3n_de_Ad%C3%A1n.jpg) claiming to show that “what almost everyone has missed is the hidden message that Michelangelo inserted: a human brain dissimulated in the figure of God.”
Although the Creation of Adam was painted around 1511, it is not until 1990 that Frank Lynn Meshberger, a physician in Anderson, Indiana, publicly noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the figures and shapes that make up the figure of God also make up an anatomically accurate figure of the human brain. Take a close look at the picture above and you will see the Sylvian fissure that divides the frontal lobe from the parietal and temporal lobes: it is represented by a bunching up of the cape by one of the angels and by a fold in God’s tunic. The bottom-most angel that appears to support the weight of God is the brainstem, and his trailing scarf the vertebral artery. The foot of another angel is the pituitary gland, and his bent knee the optic chiasm where the optic nerves from the eyes partially cross over. The ingenuity and level of detail is simply staggering, and a lasting testament to Michelangelo’s extraordinary—and, for the time, very unusual—knowledge of human anatomy.
Yeah, right. Take another look and you’ll see that if it is an image of the brain, then the cerebellum has been blown to ribbons, and there’s a very unhealthy-looking overdevelopment of the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. Also most of God’s body is in the midbrain, with a bit of His head sticking through into the frontal lobes. Given that God is the primary image in the right-hand cloud, what was M’s meaning in slicing up his body so randomly amongst different brain areas, given his “extraordinary—and, for the time, very unusual—knowledge of human anatomy”?
I think this is just another example of the powerful and compelling ability we have to extract meaningful information from very complex or confusing input – which sometimes leads us to ‘see’ clearly things which just aren’t there. You will have heard of images of the Virgin Mary on pieces of toast, or sliced tomatoes (I regularly see Lao Tsu in my porridge).
An old example is this image:
Said to be originally a photograph of a snowy mountainside, but ‘revealing’ an image of a bearded man with long hair (some say Christ, some say Gerry Garcia: it’s probably Allen Ginsberg) if you look at it long enough. If you don’t see it,don’t worry. The face will pop out at you sooner or later, and once you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to go back to the meaningless blobs.
We all do this kind of thing with clouds, as Shakespeare noted some time ago:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.— Hamlet, III.ii
OK, this is Hamlet mocking Polonius for always agreeing with what the boss says, but it only makes sense because we all know that we can see all kinds of things in the complex, ambiguous patterns of clouds.
Charles Schultz used the idea too, in Peanuts:
In case you can’t read the speech bubbles above,or the image link stops working:
Lucy Van Pelt: Aren’t the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. I could just lie here all day and watch them drift by. If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud’s formations. What do you think you see, Linus?
Linus Van Pelt: Well, those clouds up there look to me look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean. [points up] That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there… [points] …gives me the impression of the Stoning of Stephen. I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side.
Lucy Van Pelt: Uh huh. That’s very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: Well… I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie, but I changed my mind.
So, I think Neel Burton is wrong – and I think he’s missed an even more remarkable clue: God is passing the spark of life from his finger to Adam – just like the spark of life which ignites the petrol/air mixture in the combustion chamber of the petrol engine (M. did actually do drawings of a flat-four hemihead air-cooled engine, intended to power his famous helicopter, but they were lost in the 19th century). So every time I fire up the Bristol, I reflect on M’s secret message about the true meaning of life.
If you really want to get into the ‘M’s secret messages’ stuff, here’s Orion in the Vatican by Daniel A. Wilten, an online book (only $9.99): http://www.orioninthevatican.com/
Witness the Orion nebula hidden in high altars and in famous frescoes by masters such as Michelangelo since the early 1500’s
Discover the famous fresco depicting the Orion constellation in the main vault of the mother Jesuit church
Discover the true origin of the winged disk and where the ancients derived its symbolism
Learn why Hermes Trismegistos declared Egypt the image of heaven
See proof of the Hall of Records and the Orion nebula matching recent development in Egypt
Resdiscover mystical knowledge uncovered after thousands of years
Learn man’s connection to the Orion nebula and its association to consciousness
Learn why the Orion nebula is the master code
*Not a psychologist, actually. Psychology Today says: “Neel Burton, M.D., is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.”
In a previous post I talked about some research which was (mistakenly, I think, and so do the original researchers) presented as revealing ‘hardwired racism’ in the brain. Whatever that research means about racism, or, however weirdly, what racists think it means, that started me thinking about what ‘hardwired’ might really mean. Here’s an online definition:
hard-wire (härdwr); tr.v. hard-wired, hard-wir•ing, hard-wires
1. To connect (electronic components, for example) by electrical wires or cables.
2. To implement (a capability) through logic circuitry that is permanently connected within a computer and therefore not subject to change by programming.
3. To determine or put into effect by physiological or neurological mechanisms; make automatic or innate: “It may be that certain orders of anxiety are hard-wired in us” (Armand Schwerner).
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hard-wired
The first meaning is almost literal, though ‘hard’ metaphorically implies more permanence than just ‘wiring’ as a verb by itself; the second meaning is metaphorical, in that there are unlikely to be any actual wires involved, but still factually follows on from the first. Even here, some of the ‘wiring’ could actually be logic programming, but programming which isn’t accessible to change. So it’s ‘harder’ programming than the ‘firmware’ in your camera, which can be changed, but is left unchanged in normal use, and the software I’m using to write this (though strictly speaking Windows and Word are firmware, from the description I’ve just given).
The third meaning here is completely metaphorical, and it’s always necessary with metaphors to be very careful to work out where the metaphorical meaning stops. Metaphors are innately dodgy and misleading, as Terry Pratchett has Carrot Ironfoundersson point out: “…Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I have been learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative” (Pratchett, 1989, p183).
Also there are two different meanings under 3): a) to put into effect by physiological mechanisms, and b) to make automatic or innate. I don’t see that b) follows from a) and I’ll argue that through below.
I think there are two kinds of hardwiring that neuroscientists and psychologists talk about. One kind derives from the basic physiology of certain sensory and mental processes, and is likely to be shared with other animals, because that’s just the way these things have evolved to work. Basic visual processes in humans are like this, as is the link between brain activity, the hypothalamus, the adrenal glands, the release of adrenaline/epinephrine into the blood, and at least some of the effects of that release. It is easy to see how some of these basic mechanisms could be evolutionarily modified from a basic plan from species to species. Since Pavlov’s day, we’ve been learning more and more about the physiology and neuroscience of eating and satiety, and probably all mammals share some of the same basic processes, but it would make sense if it were balanced differently for continuous eaters like pandas and shrews, the complex feeding patterns of grass-eaters, or opportunistic omnivores like humans, and we have a hard-wired explanation of obesity built round this*. That roughly corresponds to 3a), and does certainly contain some automatic and innate mechanisms.
The other idea about hardwiring is sociobiological and is evolutionarily vaguer. Certain patterns of behaviour are more likely to lead to the production of reproductively successful offspring, and so are naturally selected. This only works in Darwinian terms if that pattern of behaviour is innate and automatic, such that it can be genetically transmitted and maintained. Other patterns of behaviour which are equally advantageous could be passed on culturally, and might well be selected and maintained, but here we’re talking about memes and behaviour that isn’t innate and automatic, that it can still evolve by a process of cultural selection. So how can you tell which is which? In some cases, like the excellence of traditional music, the evolutionary success of the book, and the story of the rat bone in the restaurant meal, it’s pretty clear that this is memeic (is that the right word?) evolution, but in others, like altruism, reciprocity, and male promiscuity** it seems to me that it could logically go either way. Sometimes the argument seems to me to be circular: how do we know it’s naturally selected? Because it’s a common feature of human behaviour? Why is it a common feature of human behaviour? Because it’s been naturally selected! I think this logic applies almost as well to using books instead of clay tablets as it does to behaviour in prisoner’s dilemma games.
More convincing supporting evidence might come from studies that show similar social/psychological processes in non-human mammals to those in humans, especially those which can be neatly fitted into evolutionary advantage arguments. Patterns of behaviour which can be described as reciprocity, cheating, and grudge-bearing, as discussed by Dawkins (1981) would be an example. What doesn’t count as supporting evidence is fantasies of the lifestyle of pre-human or early human hunter gatherers, where ‘hardwired’ gender differences are held to derive from the habits of cavemen going out hunting mammoths (and having a bit on the side, as shown by the well-known principle that ‘what happens on the hunt stays on the hunt’), while the cavewomen (cavegirls?) stayed home, gathering berries and digging roots – and caveyouths demonstrated their breeding fitness by rites of passage which involved wrestling with dinosaurs, probably.
There is a useful discussion by Thomas Martin of the background to the hardwired metaphor and what it might mean for human nature from an anarchist point of view here: http://www.socialanarchism.org/mod/magazine/display/128/index.php. It’s worth reading the first part for a summary of where the idea in sociobiology/psychology comes from and then, as he points out in the intro (below), the implications that might have for our understanding of the nature of human nature:
In these first years of the new century anarchism, as a philosophy and as an ongoing praxis, is faced with a number of disconcerting adjustments. Chief among these is the growing evidence that we, along with most other ideologies on the Left, have based our theory on a mistaken concept of human nature. We have learned over the years to distrust words like sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and above all that dreaded buzzword, “hard-wired” — yet we can no longer ignore the fact that these sciences are probably right about human nature. It does exist; it has biological roots; and while it does enjoy a large measure of free will, its most basic drives and emotions are indeed hard-wired. The Left has long resisted and denied these facts, on the grounds that they might justify discrimination based on heredity, or that they militate against the possibility of radical social reform, or both. I hope to demonstrate that these fears are groundless.
Martin (2006: intro)
There are some bits of Martin’s account I disagree with strongly, especially the idea that genes might ‘want’ to do anything, which he raises later, and you might not want to get into the anarchist thinking at the end, but it does discuss some of the problems that this idea gives to psychologists – and recognises that we may have to accept some inbuilt, evolutionarily selected, forms of behaviour.
But even if you accept that some aspects of our psychology are, metaphorically, hardwired, that doesn’t mean that they’re rigidly fixed. One of the most clearly hardwired bits of our behaviour is the ability to see yellow. In our retinas, we don’t have receptors for all the different colours of light. All we have are cells which are most responsive to red light, to green light, and blue light. So we can’t detect yellow light as such. Pure yellow light that falls on the retina stimulates both the red sensitive cells and the green sensitive cells to roughly the same degree, and when we get this ‘equal red, equal green’ signal, we see it as yellow. But we get the same signal if equal amounts of red and green light fall on the retina at the same time, which is why the television screen, which only shows red, green or blue light, can show us what appears to be a bright clear yellow. Now, we know about the ‘wiring’ of this. We can identify the colour sensitive cells, and we can even track the signals through to where they are combined in the brain to generate a ‘yellow’ channel. This goes beyond vague metaphorical hardwiring: if nerves be wires, then we know what the wires are. We can also trace the evolutionary background to this ability by comparing our visual system and retina with that of other mammals. But, although hardwired, this isn’t a fixed, rigid system. Old-fashioned incandescent room lighting is much yellower than sunlight, but when we are in an incandescently lit room we don’t see the yellow bias, and we see the range of colours that we might see in sunlight. Our responses to the signals from our retina are substantially shifted to compensate for the changed colour of light – without realising it. You can see how big the shift is by taking a photo with a camera in incandescent light (with ‘auto white balance’ turned off). It looks distinctly yellowish, where to us the scene looks as though it was illuminated by white light. As we get older, the fluid in our eye becomes tinged with yellow – so the whole world becomes yellower as you get older – but we’re not aware of this. The only place it shows up is where older people find difficulty in making out white letters on a yellow background, or vice versa.
OK, that’s unconscious, cognitive overriding of hardwiring – maybe by other systems which we might regard as being hardwired too. But here’s another example of how hardwiring can be modified and overridden by cultural and individual variation. Our bodies have evolved to cope with ethanol, a naturally occurring poison which has a range of damaging effects. Our livers can remove it from the bloodstream and we have an enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, to support the breakdown of alcohol to less dangerous substances. I guess if you’re being picky, you could say that this is hard-moleculed rather than hardwired. But since we enjoy some of the toxic effects of alcohol, we found ways of supplying alcohol in sufficient quantity to temporarily overwhelm this system, and cultural patterns to encourage, reward and control this overdosing. And metabolism fights back, as it’s well designed to do, by increasing the amount of alcohol dehydrogenase in the system, but the determined drunk just ramps up the input. We quite quickly develop the technology to move from 5% alcohol to 15% to 80%, and also provided a cultural overlay which makes Bollinger and Laphroaig more expensive and more desirable than straight 13% and 40%. OK, there are genetic (hardwired) differences in people’s ability to metabolise alcohol, but it’s clear that cultural factors are important in the role alcohol plays in our lives.
*I’m not sure that this is quite the same as saying that individual differences in obesity are ‘genetically determined’. My first interpretation of the genetically determined explanation was that it must derive from rapid evolutionary change, so that, sometime, in the twentieth century, there was an environmental/cultural change such that fat people got much more sex than thin people, so fatness was rapidly selected for, rather like the way the colour of the peppered moth changed with pollution levels over the last two hundred years. In retrospect, I think I’d oversimplified things, but I’m still in favour of lots of sex for fat people.
**The gender difference here might be overplayed. Traditional wisdom sometimes has it otherwise: see Willie McTell’s Married Man’s a Fool (If He thinks His Wife loves No-one Else But Him) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiODT4nKbcc, evolving into the Ry Cooder version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXjmkTuYPZU. On the other hand, it’s traditionally well-known that All Men Are Bastards, but that probably covers more than just infidelity.
References
Martin, Thomas (2006) Anarchism and the Question of Human Nature Social Anarchism Issue 37
at http://www.socialanarchism.org/mod/magazine/display/128/index.php
Pratchett, Terry (1989) Guards! Guards! London: Corgi
Story by John Hooper in The Guardian today (18 July) about Corigliano d’Otranto, a small town in southern Italy, which has appointed an (unpaid) municipal philosopher. The town mayor, Ada Fiore, is a philosophy teacher. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/17/corigliano-dotranto-italy-philosophical-town
Under Fiore’s mayorship, the council has put up ceramic plaques with quotations from the likes of Saint Augustine. It has given out postcards for distribution in bars and shops that ask existential questions, such as “Why were you born?”.
The municipal philosopher (hours 3-7 on Friday, €15 a session), Graziella Lupo, said that “Much of her work was about getting people to think clearly, listen to each other and formulate questions that bore on the subject in hand.” Right on, Graziella.
Dangerous stuff, which the head of the regional psychological professional body has roundly condemned.
Dr Giuseppe Luigi Palma said the use of a consulting philosopher was “not only misleading and confusing, but utterly perilous”. He said his organisation was ready to take “all the most appropriate actions to combat any offence that may be identified”.
What would be ‘all the most appropriate actions’ here? I guess trying the old ‘My next statement is a lie. My last statement was true’ trick on her won’t work – she’ll have seen that one before. Maybe giving out postcards saying ‘Have you ever wondered why you were born? Forget it, you don’t want to know: trust me, I’m a psychologist.’ Or could the population be infected with rampant reductionism?
If you do want to take the utterly perilous step of getting into existential queries, there is a discussion group: http://existentialquestions.hyperboards.com/ (though I think a lot of the questions there are metaphysical, rather than existential), which was linked to Existential Questions TV (http://existentialquestions.wordpress.com/tv/) – but ‘this channel has been deleted’. Worrying.
For myself, I think many existential questions can be answered by watching Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. (And although this is a perilous area where psychologists should fear to tread, I can give an explanation, based on Cox’s Transactional Stress model and the Yerkes-Dodson Law, why it isn’t a good idea for the Knight to challenge Death at chess. If you’re brave enough, email me).
Graziella Lupo is on Facebook. I haven’t friended her, but she gives some public information: among her favourite authors/books are Zygmunt Bauman (yes!), Martha Nussbaum and Virginia Wolf, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
One of her favourite films is The Matrix – not a good choice, but perhaps it’s compulsory for philosophers. That’s backed up with Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which I hope she’s recommending to the citizens of Corigliano d’Otranto.
Palma has a website: http://www.giuseppeluigipalma.com/, which is about his bid in the 2010 Puglia regional elections.
Lupo doesn’t seem impressed with Palma’s warnings:
“I don’t think the college of psychologists knows what a philosophical consultant is.” And being a philosophical consultant, she added: “Their criticism is in any case devoid of epistemological content.”
Can’t argue with that – at least, not without looking up ‘epistemological’.
ps As I’m coming near the end of 39 years of teaching psychology, the existential questions ‘what was that all about, then?’ and ‘was there any point?’ do crop up. ‘All the most appropriate action’ needs to be taken – writing blogs, calvados and singing, probably.
pps On the same page of The Guardian was the headline: “Chain of bicycle thieves sought by Paris police”. I bet that gave them a laugh. They got a completely irrelevant reference to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves into the piece, too.
Or: are Daily Mail reporters hardwired to misrepresent psychology stories? Probably not.
This started out as a story about the Daily Mail misrepresenting some neuropsych research (why is that news?) but as I looked into it and thought about it, it involved some other issues.
The starting point is a Daily Mail story “Racism is hard-wired into our brains” about some research at New York University recently published in Nature Neuroscience (Kubota, Banaji & Phelps, 2012). I picked it up in The Guardian, initially in a letter to The Guardian from the three authors of the original journal article thanking The Guardian for a piece it had run in criticism of the Mail story, and making it clear that they did not say what the Mail said ‘scientists say’.
As I followed up the story, though, I found an account of how the original research is part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race, and (conversely) how lefty’s (sic) and the BBC only object to ‘hardwiring’ when it’s about race [not discussed in this post: I might get back to it later]. It also started me thinking about ‘hardwiring’ (a word which was widely used in reports of the research, though it wasn’t in the original press release) and what it means and implies. So, below is an account of the original misreporting, then stuff about the Jewish plot. A thoughtful (I hope) bit about the concept of hardwiring will make a future post.
OK, start with the research and the Mail story. Here’s the abstract for the original paper, titled The Neuroscience of Race:
Abstract: As the racial composition of the population changes, intergroup interactions are increasingly common. To understand how we perceive and categorize race and the attitudes that flow from it, scientists have used brain imaging techniques to examine how social categories of race and ethnicity are processed, evaluated and incorporated in decision-making. We review these findings, focusing on black and white race categories. A network of interacting brain regions is important in the unintentional, implicit expression of racial attitudes and its control. On the basis of the overlap in the neural circuitry of race, emotion and decision-making, we speculate as to how this emerging research might inform how we recognize and respond to variations in race and its influence on unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.
This paper is at http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v15/n7/full/nn.3136.html, but you need a subscription (or £22) to view the full paper. There’s a Nature News piece (essentially a press release) How the brain views race: How do our brains respond when we see someone of a different ethnicity? By Mo Costandi at http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-brain-views-race-1.10886 (Costandi, 2012), with quotes from Liz Phelps, one of the authors, where I think most of the later press stuff came from. The original paper is a review of other research which suggests that the regions of the brain involved in making decisions about the race of a person overlap with the regions of the brain involved in emotion: “there’s a network of brain regions that is consistently activated in neuroimaging studies of race processing. This network overlaps with the circuits involved in decision-making and emotion regulation, and includes the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).” (Constandi, 2012)
Yes, so?
Well, there’s a background in “the implicit association task, which measures initial, evaluative responses. It involves asking people to pair concepts such as black and white with concepts like good and bad. What you find is that most white Americans take longer to make a response that pairs black with good and white with bad than vice versa. This reveals their implicit preferences” (Constandi, 2012). This is a pretty well-known finding in psychology now, and implicit association measures are used quite a lot (including studies I find very unconvincing about whether people present their ‘true selves’ online – but that should be another post). Phelps mentions a 2000 study which showed a link between this kind of implicit preference measure with the brain areas mentioned above. Constandi doesn’t reference it, but it must be a paper in J Cognitive Neuroscience titled Performance on Indirect Measures of Race Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation by Elizabeth Phelps & six others (Phelps & al, 2000):
Abstract: We used fMRI to explore the neural substrates involved in the unconscious evaluation of Black and White social groups. Specifically, we focused on the amygdala, a subcortical structure known to play a role in emotional learning and evaluation. In Experiment 1, White American subjects observed faces of unfamiliar Black and White males. The strength of amygdala activation to Black-versus-White faces was correlated with two indirect (unconscious) measures of race evaluation (Implicit Association Test [IAT] and potentiated startle), but not with the direct (conscious) expression of race attitudes. In Experiment 2, these patterns were not obtained when the stimulus faces belonged to familiar and positively regarded Black and White individuals. Together, these results suggest that amygdala and behavioral responses to Black-versus-White faces in White subjects reflect cultural evaluations of social groups modified by individual experience.
As far as I can make out, the 2012 paper is reviewing a number of similar stories, which show that a) Whites may show (not consciously recognised) prejudice against Blacks, and b) emotion-relevant areas of the brain show activity when they’re doing that. Phelps suggests in the Constandi interview that some of this activity might be related to resolving (presumably unconscious) conflicts which arise when ‘right-thinking’ people feel stirrings of racial prejudice. This might fit with those good old 70s social psychology ideas of cognitive dissonance (someone must have done a fMRI study of cognitive dissonance, surely? I’d like to hear of it, if they have). So, overall, this looks like studies which sort-of, more-or-less, probably (remember that fMRI isn’t very precise, and there are a lot of calculations and assumptions that go into those nice coloured brain pictures) relate brain activity to psychological processes which we already have a pretty good knowledge of: interesting, but not very surprising.
But if it’s in the brain, it’s much more significant than if it’s in the behaviour, or so the Mail (and lots of others) think, so evidence about racism in the brain is more convincing than evidence from what we do. In the press release, Phelps points out that we already know that’s there’s lots of evidence of unintentional (or implicit) bias against African-Americans in US society. The way the research should process, she says, is: “We need to investigate how our implicit preferences are linked to the choices and decisions we make. We want to use this knowledge to reduce the unintended consequences of race bias — the things we do that aren’t consistent with our beliefs.” (Constandi, 2012). The title of the Nature News piece is How the Brain Sees Race, which doesn’t seem to reflect the piece well, but it gets worse when translated by the Daily Mail:
Racism is ‘hardwired’ into the human brain – and people can be prejudiced without knowing it
- Same circuits that allow people to judge ethnic groups also drive emotional decisions
- Even ‘right thinking’ people can have racist attitudes
- Racism operates below the conscious level
By Rob Waugh (at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2164844/Racism-hardwired-human-brain–people-racists-knowing-it.html)
If you take the specific points made in the headline and subheads, and number them:
Racism is ‘hardwired’ into the human brain (1) – and people can be prejudiced without knowing it (2)
Same circuits that allow people to judge ethnic groups also drive emotional decisions (3); Even ‘right thinking’ people can have racist attitudes (4); Racism operates below the conscious level (5),
then four out of the five are not unreasonable (well, 3 is a bit dodgy: what do you mean by ‘judge’, here – and who decided that ‘judging’ was the most significant interaction between cultures?) – it’s just the big ‘hardwired’ headline that comes out of nowhere. 2 and 5 say the same thing, and are only slightly different from 4, but that’s just sloppy sub-editing. But ‘hardwired racism’ is what sticks in perceptions of the article: when I was searching for more information for this post, I found lots of repeats of the Mail headline in other newspapers and posts around the world, and it seems to have been preferred to the headline that Nature News used.
A bit further down, the Mail claims: “Brain scans have proved that interactions with people of other ethnic backgrounds set off reactions that may be completely unknown to our conscious selves.” It then goes on with quite a lot of quotes from Phelps which aren’t the same as the ones in the Nature News piece (as I’ve noted previously, newspaper quotes about science stories are often taken straight from PR material, so credit to the Mail for doing that – though you’ll see below that they didn’t research the story completely), but were quotes from the original paper – which seem to fit with the story I’ve given above, and with the Nature News piece (she goes on a bit more about the social importance of research like this in these quotes than in the Nature News piece), and not with the beginning of the article. A couple of years ago, when I got one of my classes to review psychology stories in the press, they often found that the main story was reasonably accurate and informative, but the headline and opening often distorted the story considerably, and they noted that this happened quite a lot with the Mail.
What made this story interesting to me was that Elizabeth Phelps and the other authors took the trouble to repudiate the false message of the Mail story. They wrote to The Guardian in response to a Guardian article also criticising the Mail’s version. Maybe they wrote to the Mail too, but I can’t find any hint of that on the Mail’s page for the article. It’s worth giving their letter in full:
As the authors of the recent Nature Neuroscience article on the neuroscience of race, we would like to express our gratitude for the Guardian’s critique of an article published in the Daily Mail entitled “Racism is ‘hardwired’ into the human brain”. The Guardian’s response, by Richard Seymour (Comment is free, 27 June), is an accurate and responsible representation of the review article. Although the content of the Mail’s article consisted of quotes from the original piece, the paper did not contact the researchers for comment on the scientific conclusions. The sensational title that the Daily Mail selected not only misrepresents the science, but is also damaging for intergroup relations. By using the word “hardwired” the Mail title implies that racism is innate.
As the Guardian article accurately cites, race attitudes are largely culturally determined and shift over time. It is our opinion that the Daily Mail’s title was irresponsible and we applaud the Guardian’s efforts to stand with the scientists and accurately represent research.
Jennifer Kubota, Mahzarin Banaji, Elizabeth Phelps New York University(this is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/02/mail-race-nature-neuroscience, and The Guardian article by Richard Seymour is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/27/what-racism-hardwired-headline-daily-mail
Right on, Jeni, Mahzarin and Liz.
In looking for material online about this research, I came across stuff which makes the Mail’s version look reasonable and balanced.
Here’s a blog headline and opening:
Jewish Scientist Nears Physical Cure For ‘White Racism.’ A Nanotechnology Lobotomy?
Time is running out for a white race already brainwashed into accepting, even welcoming their own fate.
‘Racism’ will be cured by future proceedures such as nano-tech operations to lobotomise areas of the brain as well as to alter DNA to ‘breed out’ the ability to discriminate within the white brain:
“Racism, says a leading Jewish scientist, “is ‘hardwired’ into the human brain – and people (Ed: in the terms of political correctness this means whites) can be prejudiced without knowing it.” Says Dr Elizabeth Phelps, of New York University. [I can’t find this quote from Phelps elsewhere: I think it’s probably constructed from the Mail headline]
I originally found this in the Our Weapon is Truth blog, posted on June 27, but then I found exactly the same stuff (including the missing double quote the third para) in Pragmatic Witness, posted on June 28, and Endzog, possibly the original source, posted on June 26. I wish my stuff was picked up and recirculated so quickly. The Weapon is Truth URL is http://beautifulnightmare-killumbus.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/jewish-scientist-nears-physical-cure.html – but you don’t have to go there: I read this stuff so you don’t have to.
I think the ‘wiping out the white race’ logic is that if we reduce white racism, then whites will inevitably be overwhelmed by other races (because the other races are innately superior?), or maybe ‘whiteness’ will be bred out of the world through miscegenation. The piece somewhat over-interprets Phelp’s quotes, I think:
In a sentence which betrays the plan to alter the human genome and the brain of individuals Dr Phelps says that “The finding may force researchers to think about racism in entirely new ways, and the findings published in Nature Neuroscience could lead to fresh ways of thinking about unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.”
Sorry, run that by me again? I’m always striving for ‘fresh ways of thinking’ in myself and others – but I hadn’t thought of trying altering genomes or nano-surgery. Nano-surgery? Here’s how it will work:
Here is such an application in development. One day, created to mimic bacteria and attuned to eat away fixed portions of the brain before dissolving, it could be dispensed through a tablet to offending schoolchildren or thought-criminals like Emma West or having been genetically engineered to target Caucasians, perhaps even released into the water supply in short bursts:
(Emma West is the drunk-racist-abuse-on-tram person: I had to look that up)
Don’t worry guys: we haven’t discovered the hardwired centre of racism in the brain, the kind of tumour-attacking nanotechnology described in the video wouldn’t work for ‘eating away’ the racism centre (though if you could find a racism neurotransmitter, I can imagine that it might be possible to nanofocus on that), and I can’t begin to imagine how you could alter the human genome to affect any of this (to move some bits of the brain away from others?) even less what Kotaba & al’s research has got to do with that. The ‘white race’ (whatever that is) is still safe.
OK, these people are fruitcakes, and what they say doesn’t make sense – but the kind of thing the Mail headline writers do (thoughtlessly, maybe, when it comes to science stories) gives them something to lever against. So I wish the Mail would be more thoughtful (and accurate) in how it headlines psychology research.
On the other hand, there’s no guarding against delusion: who’d have thought that the National Cancer Institute’s syrupy cancer-busting nanotechnology promotion would have inspired fantasies of eating away schoolchildren’s brains?
References
Constandi, Mo (2012) How the brain views race: How do our brains respond when we see someone of a different ethnicity? Nature News, 26 June 2012
At http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-brain-views-race-1.10886
Kubota, Jennifer T, Banaji, Mahzarin R & Phelps Elizabeth A (2012) The neuroscience of race Nature Neuroscience 15, 940–948
At http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v15/n7/full/nn.3136.html
Phelps, Elizabeth A., O’Connor, Kevin J., Cunningham, William A., Funayama, E. Sumie, Gatenby, J. Christopher, Gore, John C. & Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2000) Performance on Indirect Measures of Race Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12(5), 729–738
at http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/cunningham/pdf/phelps.jocn.2000.pdf
Phelps, Elizabeth A. & Thomas, Laura A. (2003) Race, Behavior, and the Brain: The Role of Neuroimaging in Understanding Complex Social Behaviors Political Psychology 24(4), 747-758
At http://www.psych.nyu.edu/phelpslab/papers/03_PP_V24No4.pdf
millerpsych 
